Thursday, February 11, 2016

Sixties Music: Iron Butterfly

a few days ago I eulogized Signe Tolson, citing "Tobacco Road" as her signature contribution to American musical history.

That was the 1960's version. The saying goes, if you remember the sixties ... you were never really IN it!

Having never been a member of the drug culture, I have no idea what that means. But I spent a LOT of time in Bars in the late sixties, and two songs that were ALWAYS on the Juke Box (kids, ask your parents what this means) were "Tobacco Road" and .... one other.

Gracie Slick stepped in for Signe and deserves an entire accolade for herself, but honey, you gotta die to get a NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET on this chart. (AND yes, I did buy SURREALISTIC PILLOW on

Still ... and I'm going back to the comments section from that original post ... there are some people who just get all cranky about how hard "Hard Rock" should/could be , so the Professor crank up the Way Back Machine for this one ... special ... psychedelic moment.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the unofficial theme song of IPSC:

INNA GADDA DA VIDA, by Iron Butterfly! (All 17 minutes of the Full Version .. play it as background while you surf the net ... I do.)

WHY have I designated this the "unofficial theme song of IPSC?

Because it takes FOREVER to get through; nobody understands it, but they really like it; and if they don't, they play it once and then they never come back to it.

3 comments:

In 1970, I was on stand-down duty at the 25th Infantry Division Base Camp in Cu Chi, Vietnam, when a Phillipino quintet performed on a very small stage ... and their signature number was InnaGadaDavida!

I was amazed that, while the theme kind of got lost in the translation, the DRUMMER was absolutely perfect .. he never lost a beat!

It was kind of a let-down the next day. Because they played three gigs in one day, we had to let them overnight on the base. Turned out that the go-go dancer was a guy in drag (okay, a very passable ...) .. but she shacked up with one of our Spec-4 troups so I had to eject them off the base for moral purposes.

It was the Major in command of the company who blew the whistle on them and their One True Love.

Personally, I though it was .. um .. interesting that their entire all-night tryst took place in a temporary barracks populated by sixty grunts, and nobody actually complained.

Well, we didn't have television .....

It was kind of a disappointment to me, though. They were hired for a 3-day concert series, and they were really quite talented. I wanted to hear their innagadadavida performance again, because we just didn't GET a lot of 'live modern music' there ... 7,000 miles from San Francisco.

(No, I'm not vouching for the 'go-go dancer! But when you think about it, that was rather "San Francisco", too.)